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Authors: Dave Van Ronk
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Catholic organization, because he was a firm anticlerical. It did not even occur to him—or to us at the time, since we were all hard-core sectarians and hated the Communists like poison—that the real reason not to work with the ACTU was its role in the Red-baiting attack that had destroyed the core of industrial unionism in the United States.
In any case, Sam hit the ceiling, and he blamed me for the whole thing. He considered me the Judas Iscariot of the anarchist movement, and he
would get shit-faced drunk and come into meetings and curse me up hill and down dale. It got incredibly abusive, and there were several times when I had to be physically restrained—all in all, a very ugly situation, which hurt both of us. I remember one night he had just finished denouncing me as a tool of the Vatican or something like that, and he sat down, and then he staggered to his feet and shouted, “And furthermore, I want that fucking hat back!”
Sam and I finally managed a sort of reconciliation, but only after several years of not speaking to each other. When Terri and I got married in 1961, I called Esther on I forget what pretext, and she asked us to come by. They were living in Co-op Village, on the Lower East Side, so we went over there and Sam gave me a book of posters by Sin, the watercolorist from the Spanish Civil War. Peace was made, but things were never the same. He was getting more and more bitter as he got older, and the liquor wasn’t helping any, besides which by that time I was becoming involved with the Trotskyists—but that’s another story.
The politics and the music overlapped in a lot of ways, not all of which have been understood by people who have written about the history of the folk scene. For example, some writers have concluded that those of us who chose not to sing political songs did so because we were apolitical. It is true that in some cases this choice was a reaction to the previous generation and their political affiliations, but for many of us it was a purely aesthetic decision. For myself, I was always ready to go to a rally or a demonstration or a benefit for this, that, or the other cause, and to sing my songs, but I did very little political material. It did not suit my style, and I never felt that I did it convincingly. I just did not have that kind of voice or that kind of presence. Also, although I am a singer and have always had strong political views, I felt that my politics were no more relevant to my music than they would have been to the work of any other craftsman. Just because you are a cabinetmaker and a leftist, are you supposed to make left-wing cabinets?
That said, a great many of us drew a particularly strong distinction between ourselves and the Stalinist singers. The left was so miniscule at this point that you knew pretty much who everybody was and what their politics were, and there was a very clear split between the singers who were associated with the LYL and those who were not. The nonpoliticals and the
non-Communist leftists tended to coalesce, by and large, the exception being Hof Shamir, the Zionist youth group, which was a big element at that time and tended more towards the LYL-ers.
Overall, the CP was still the dominant influence on leftist politics. In terms of membership, it was probably bigger than everybody else combined, from the Social Democrats all the way over to the anarchists. But it was also extremely vulnerable. The Communists had been slapped silly during the witch hunt, and in that three-year period from the time of the Berlin uprising through to the time of the Hungarian Revolution, more and more of the dirt from the Kremlin was being exposed. In a way, I almost sympathized with them. I mean, put yourself in their shoes: here you are, you’ve spent thirty or forty years of your life peddling poison that you thought was candy—think what that can do to somebody’s head. On the other hand, we could see what was happening in Eastern Europe, and
In any case, Sam hit the ceiling, and he blamed me for the whole thing. He considered me the Judas Iscariot of the anarchist movement, and he
would get shit-faced drunk and come into meetings and curse me up hill and down dale. It got incredibly abusive, and there were several times when I had to be physically restrained—all in all, a very ugly situation, which hurt both of us. I remember one night he had just finished denouncing me as a tool of the Vatican or something like that, and he sat down, and then he staggered to his feet and shouted, “And furthermore, I want that fucking hat back!”
Sam and I finally managed a sort of reconciliation, but only after several years of not speaking to each other. When Terri and I got married in 1961, I called Esther on I forget what pretext, and she asked us to come by. They were living in Co-op Village, on the Lower East Side, so we went over there and Sam gave me a book of posters by Sin, the watercolorist from the Spanish Civil War. Peace was made, but things were never the same. He was getting more and more bitter as he got older, and the liquor wasn’t helping any, besides which by that time I was becoming involved with the Trotskyists—but that’s another story.
The politics and the music overlapped in a lot of ways, not all of which have been understood by people who have written about the history of the folk scene. For example, some writers have concluded that those of us who chose not to sing political songs did so because we were apolitical. It is true that in some cases this choice was a reaction to the previous generation and their political affiliations, but for many of us it was a purely aesthetic decision. For myself, I was always ready to go to a rally or a demonstration or a benefit for this, that, or the other cause, and to sing my songs, but I did very little political material. It did not suit my style, and I never felt that I did it convincingly. I just did not have that kind of voice or that kind of presence. Also, although I am a singer and have always had strong political views, I felt that my politics were no more relevant to my music than they would have been to the work of any other craftsman. Just because you are a cabinetmaker and a leftist, are you supposed to make left-wing cabinets?
That said, a great many of us drew a particularly strong distinction between ourselves and the Stalinist singers. The left was so miniscule at this point that you knew pretty much who everybody was and what their politics were, and there was a very clear split between the singers who were associated with the LYL and those who were not. The nonpoliticals and the
non-Communist leftists tended to coalesce, by and large, the exception being Hof Shamir, the Zionist youth group, which was a big element at that time and tended more towards the LYL-ers.
Overall, the CP was still the dominant influence on leftist politics. In terms of membership, it was probably bigger than everybody else combined, from the Social Democrats all the way over to the anarchists. But it was also extremely vulnerable. The Communists had been slapped silly during the witch hunt, and in that three-year period from the time of the Berlin uprising through to the time of the Hungarian Revolution, more and more of the dirt from the Kremlin was being exposed. In a way, I almost sympathized with them. I mean, put yourself in their shoes: here you are, you’ve spent thirty or forty years of your life peddling poison that you thought was candy—think what that can do to somebody’s head. On the other hand, we could see what was happening in Eastern Europe, and
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